Calendars

• Google Calendar is a free Web-based calendar application that is natively supported by the Calendar app on your iPhone 3GS. By using Google Calendar as a bridge between your desktop calendar application, be it Outlook on Windows or iCal on Mac, you can sync calendar events to your iPhone without using iTunes. Google provides an application called Google Calendar Sync that provides sync capabilities to Outlook. On Mac-based computers, both Spanning Sync and BusyCal provide the necessary functionality to sync your Calendar to Google Calendar and your iPhone. Both programs are free to try. As of the date of publication, the full license for Spanning Sync costs $65 and the full license for BusyCal costs $50.
  
  

Contacts

• Web-based contact management applications such as Google Contacts, Soocial and Plaxo provide an online home for your desktop address book and iPhone apps that enable you to sync those contact files to your iPhone. All three services can be linked with desktop address books, including Outlook and Address Book for Mac, to provide an alternative method for transferring your contacts from your computer to your iPhone 3GS. All three services are free to use. Soocial and Plaxo offer paid upgrades that provide additional features and storage capacity.
  
  

Music

• You can sync your iPhone 3GS with your music collection using a variety of free music management applications. On Windows, you can use programs such as Winamp, MusicMonkey or doubleTwist to manage your iPhone music library. These programs enable you to transfer music from your Windows computer directly to your iPhone iPod app. On Mac computers, doubleTwist and sharePod are free applications that offer users the ability to sync music files to an iPhone without iTunes. A final alternative is to jailbreak your iPhone and install the PwnTunes software, which enables you to drag and drop music files from your Windows or Mac computer directly onto a mounted iPhone device. The jailbreaking process does void the Apple warranty and should only be employed by users who wish to have more control over their device.
  
  

Files

• Sugar Sync and Dropbox are free file-syncing applications available on both Windows and Mac operating systems. These applications sync files stored in a particular folder on your computer to the Web, making them available from any Web-connected device, including your iPhone 3GS. The iPhone apps for each of these services provide a simple interface for accessing whatever files you save to your sync folder, including video and audio files. Both services offer paid upgrades that enable you to add additional space to your account if you find that you need more space for storing files.